“—ence detect …” the suit said, as more, individually slightly lighter kicks struck her all over her back and rear. This time she was thrown against the drawers of the chest, and the whole thing nearly tipped over. Then it bounced off the bulkhead behind and she was thrown back again, turning woozily round as she did so – the little trails of smoke made pretty spirals in the relatively still air – before she started to slide downwards. The ruined, ragged back of the suit went stuttering down the set of drawer handles, jolting her as she slumped to the deck.

A one-armed figure was standing in the doorway looking at her, just lowering his one good arm.

“Ship … re … establish – blish – lish – ish – shh …” the suit whispered to her, and sighed to quietness. The faint draft of oxygen at her nostrils faded.

Then the one-armed figure in the doorway lit up brilliantly all down one side, from foot to scalp, and was thrown bodily, hard against the door jamb, pieces flying off it as it rebounded, lit up from the other side now, disintegrating.

What was left, reduced to something like a too-thin, charred, one-armed skeleton, fell forwards, hitting the deck at about the same time as she did.

Twenty-three

(S -0)

Something.

Somebody talking to her.

Asking questions. A question:

Did she want to keep both sets of arms?

Of course she wanted to keep both sets of arms. What sort of idiotic, dumb-ass—

… back to sleep …

This would all be hurried, extemporised, done much more quickly than the normal guidelines advised, to keep to the schedule.

She didn’t know, didn’t care, didn’t even know where she was, in this darkness. Once or twice she woke up – in this darkness – and wondered who she was.

But each time she remembered.

“… it was all a sociological experiment by the Zihdren. A rogue Philosophariat – the Philosophariat Apposital … I think that was their name – they, it – it was all down to one individual in the end – planted everything in the Book of Truth according to some obscure Metalogical hypothesis, to settle an argument between two groups of scholars with opposing theories. Briper Drodj, the Scribe, elab-orated on the basics as everybody pretty much knew, but the essence was always what the Zihdren had put there. Of course this whole approach was later discredited and the Philosophariat Apposital was ‘Dissolved with Moderate Disgrace’ not long after, and this particular experiment – like many similar others – was quietly forgotten. The Zihdren Sublimed a couple of centuries later, decades before the Gzilt even reached space.